The New DOOM Thread (2016)

[Drax]

Make pc cases gr8 again m8

 

[DraQ]

Point taken regarding relatively specialized character builds instead of maxing every attribute/skill. However, removing layers of character customization still makes the game feel less of an RPG to me, or less of an CRPG anyway. Not to mention that from what I've seen, the system is still quite breakable/exploitable.

The thing is all that extra customization in Oblivion is dead weight. It doesn't do anything meaningful. It's not Morrowind where strength instead of skills governed damage dealt with ALL weapons or where agility affected how well you avoided knockdowns. It's a game without to-hit mechanics where agility is a weaker marksman skill. Skyrim is a step in the right direction from there, despite moving it further away from Morrowind, if only because any direction away from OB is a right direction.

Weapon feel, audio/visual feedback from shooting/hitting enemies and level design are FPS essentials, it's what modern genre offerings fail at spectacularly almost as a rule and why DOOM is still the king all these years later.

Actually the best part about DOOMs, especially 2, is dat metal feel darkly surreal atmosphere achieved largely through map design. Doom wouldn't be Doom if everything was just the same but you ran around rooms full of crates shooting handfuls of bland, retarded cyborgs virtually unable to shoot back.

When you take a look at the best SP FPSes out there the emerging pattern will be that they first and foremost succeeded at building the atmospheres and environments.

Of course gunplay matters, we're talking about the genre where your base gameplay is shooting at stuff.

Operative word being "stuff". Also, equal if not greater part of the gameplay is getting shot at and when you spend some tens of hours shooting and getting shot at you really need diversity in all available forms to spice the experience up.

Also, you heap praises at Dishonored because of gameplay elements you're enamored with like "great movement" when the "no satisfactory targets" applies doubly to that game considering you're a magic ninja assassin that can teleport, stop time and see through walls facing regular mooks that never look up, give up chase in moments and move in small groups, it's a cat and mouse situation if I ever saw one.

Well, for starters Dishonored did something new. What new things did Q2 do?
Then, even regular mooks in Dishonored could kill you very quickly once in combat. Sure they were pathetic one on one, but in groups they were an actual threat if they got to face you.
Then, combat and environmental systems felt fun and intermeshing - even completely unchallenging stealth was more fun than Q2 combat because you got to use novel movement mechanics and had to parse levels for routes, but in combat you actually benefitted from moving, using powers, quickly switching weapons and targets (like quickly shooting an incoming masked dude in the foot with minicrossbow then finishing him off with a sword) to exploit opportunities, exploiting environment and so on. And then you could do funky, borderline exploitish stuff, like attaching springrazors to small, throwable items like bottles or severed heads to create springrazor grenades, or to live rats.

Bowplay is a superfluous gameplay element in Oblivion while gunplay is an essential gameplay element of any FPS, bad analogy.

It's THE core element if you build a dedicated archer character focused on anything but archery. And the argument still stands, no matter how awesome is shooting your weapon, it's not going to be fun if shooting *something* with it sucks.

Level layout is the most important element of level design, aesthetics and environmental diversity are welcome but still secondary. Quake 2 levels have a good geometry, consistent visual style/tone, involve a solid amount of backtracking and have a decent number of secrets to find.

Nah. First you need good reason to keep running around all these levels to be able to appreciate their design. You also need places to feel distinct for exploration to not to be a chore.
Also a visual style can be too consistent. Quake 2 gets tedious really fast because it's almost the same everywhere. Good FPS varies its environments. Doom had steady progression from iso standard scifi base to increasingly hellish and surreal environments, System Shock had different style for each level plus stuff like completely dark maintenance level or bridge overgrown with organic goo. Hexen1 had guardians of fire/ice/steel, swamps, badlands and whatnot. Hexen 2 had each episode based on different civilization. Blood had trains, graveyards, circuses, icebergs and desecrated cathedrals. Unreal alternated between oudoor sceneries, several different styles of native architecture and several different styles of sci-fi environments, all while the lighting conditions changed as you progressed to reflect passage of time.
Variation of levels and themes is how an FPS tells a story, often it's the only way an FPS can tell one. Without it you're just in an endless arena, and an endless arena full of same tincan retards to blow up over and over gets old really fast.
And all that variation can be achieved without sacrificing the layout. I don't think there is any location in Q2 that can stand up to say, Sunspire, Bluff Eversmoking, or Chizra in terms of raw layout. Not even the Palace.

Do you have an example of ample tactical advantages? A linear cave remains a linear cave regardless of how pretty it looks, it still showcases lazy/boring level design.

A linear cave that later loops back on itself via rope bridge is no longer a series of arenas, because you can have archers or mages shooting player while not being immediately reachable, there can be pieces of cover available (and Skyrim's AI, for what it's worth, is smart enough to take cover from ranged attacks) there can be traps to force player's movement or threaten them during combat (or to be exploited) and so on. And that's just considering Skyrim's admittedly poor dungeons - if you take into account exterior locations, then the whole linear thing goes away, as you can pick your direction of approach often facing distinct challenges and advantages, have even more room to set up defensible spots for the enemies, have opportunities to use physics and z-axis in combat, and in case the location still tries to pass itself as linear (many don't), there are ample opportunities to break the sequence.

Apart from linear dungeon slogs Skyrim really features some well designed locations.

 

[lightbane]

 

[Average Manatee]

>gets hit in the face by a cyberdemon rocket
>loses 15 HP

 

[Excidium II]

lol

 

[dunno lah]

This is BTE material lah.

 

[DraQ]

CD's rockets also seem quite a bit slower.

 

[Average Manatee]

Slower, smaller hitbox, and has virtually no splash damage/radius. Plus the "plink" sound of getting hit by a FUCKING EXPLOSIVE ROCKET.

Does fire faster though.

 

[Lyric Suite]

This game is fucking garbage.

 

[lightbane]

I like how he's randomly stunned upon suffering severe wounds. I suppose at the base game you were assumed to come closer and press the AWESOME! button to start a fatality/glory kill. Since original Doom didn't have those, the end result is that he becomes a piece of cake to defeat.

 

[Leechmonger]

It's 40% off on Steam. I've lost the ability to predict what casuals buy: did it not sell well?

 

[udm]

40% off already?

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

It's 40% off on Steam. I've lost the ability to predict what casual buy: did it not sell well?

http://www.shacknews.com/article/94944/doom-sales-reach-over-500k-on-pc-alone

Doom is just a little over two weeks old today, and while we wait to hear an official word from Bethesda Softworks regarding how well it’s sold, we know the game has at least sold 500,000 copies on PC alone.

According to SteamSpy, there are over 500,000 Steam users who currently own Doom. Considering the game has been out for over two weeks and this is just data from the PC version of the game, we have a feeling Doom could have reached over a million units sold across all platforms, and possibly even reaching two million units.

This is, of course, purely speculation on our part, although when you consider console versions of AAA games tend to sell more than the PC version, you could see why we’d come to this conclusion.

As of now, all we can do is wait until Bethesda Softworks officially announces Doom’s sales. Let’s just hope it’s enough copies to warrant more Doom from id Software in the near future.

Knowing Bethesda marketing hype machine, the WooD compared to the behemoth like Skyrim is a small peanuts. But I suspect it didn't sold how much as they expected, so we have no info from them.

 

[Melcar]

40% off already?

Still too much to pay for that turd.

 

[Cyberarmy]

40% off already?

There was a %50 off first day via PayPal.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

Well that pretty much answers my question. I shouldn't bother with this title.
To be honest, I already had my doubts from the start. I like the Doom games but I have always been more of a fan of Half Life, Unreal, and later inspired games such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein/Wolfenstein 2009, Jedi Outcast and Academy, and Elite Force 1 and 2.
Occasionally retro can be fun but it is not worth spending a lot of money on.

 

[sexbad?]

This isn't a retro game.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

Perhaps a poor choice of description but it does set aside most of modern FPS conventions like forced story telling, cinematics, and so on with more emphasis on action.
I probably should have written old school instead.

 

[Cadmus]

Perhaps a poor choice of description but it does set aside most of modern FPS conventions like forced story telling, cinematics, and so on with more emphasis on action.
I probably should have written old school instead.

It didn't feel oldschool to me, it felt slightly retarded and bland. Old school is more fun.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

You bring up what I felt what I felt when I saw the trailers of Doom 4 and several gameplay videos, that it really looks rather bland.
Mind you, Doom 3 and the expansion were not always that good either. A while ago I played them again and though I enjoyed them in general when they were first released they are not really titles I would come back to so soon.
I have been playing a lot of wads on zdoom/gzdoom such as Hell on Earth starters pack and Wolfenstein Blade of Agony. Both are decent map packs with BoA having some story elements too but sadly I have not been able to find anything evocative of Half Life or Return to Castle Wolfenstein. A good balance between story and FPS action.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Kind of suprised you guys puted razorfist's review of DOOM but not of this guy.

 

[pippin]

Bunnyhop has his own thread.

 

[Cadmus]

Another one of those "ID successfully adapted the old formula for 2016".

 

[BelisariuS.F]

Kind of suprised you guys puted razorfist's review of DOOM but not of this guy.

He says that he didn't like arena shooters because they remove resource management (which is not exactly true), and then he praises resource management in the new Doom, which is effectively non-existent because of the fact that you can refill your health and ammo with a button press at any time.

 

[shihonage]

That yellow DOOM ad on billboards and sides of buses accurately reflects the game's creative bankrupcy.